


and the new

by paladinpalindrome



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Red Wedding, Religion, a storm of swords spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-03
Updated: 2013-05-03
Packaged: 2017-12-10 07:11:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/783273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paladinpalindrome/pseuds/paladinpalindrome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the smallest moments of silence across the seven kingdoms, there are seven prayers for seven gods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and the new

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own nothing, and like Jon Snow, I know nothing. Anything recognizable is kindly borrowed from the Asoiaf series or the HBO show. 
> 
> Note: For those who haven't read the books, there are spoilers for events in A Storm of Swords (including the Red Wedding and beyond) that have not been seen on the show yet.

Trussed and bound to a tree on the rough forest floor, she had never felt further away from home, less protected by the gods. 

Brienne had never felt right praying to the Maiden, even in her youngest days before the pitying looks of women and the words of cruel men had sunken into her skull. It had always seemed so false, too removed from herself, kneeling before that ethereal woman painted in flowers and lace while her own hair was rough and shorn and her hands large and calloused. Brienne had quickly found her way to the altar of the Warrior, the strong champion that she so longed to be, a true mirror she wouldn't feel mocked for kneeling before. She calls up the face of the Warrior in her mind now, hoping that if she remembers enough details of the face from her childhood sept that it'll drown out the sounds of Hoat's men beating the Kingslayer on the other side of their meager fire. Brienne knows swordplay, not healing, but even she recognizes that the smell rising from the stump dangling uselessly at the end of Ser Jaime's arm is dangerous. 

Brienne isn't one to look away from her fears, but for now she closes her eyes and ears against these men's abuse and the Kingslayer's feverish moans and the flickering campfire and prays for strength. She doesn't try to remember the old prayers, too far gone in her feelings of desperation and helplessness as she offers up names to the Warrior for protection. She ignores the fact that the name she repeats isn't her own, but _Jaime._

Hundreds of miles away in a gilded sept, Tyrion prays for his brother, too. 

  


  


  


Robb knows he should pray to the Warrior, but he prays to the Crone. The picture reminds him of Old Nan, and Old Nan reminds him of home. 

Robb knows he should pray to the Warrior, and he does, on the battlefield, and when he is cleaning his sword, but here, in the quiet of Riverrun's sept he prays to the Crone for wisdom, and he prays alone. 

His mother had stopped asking him to join her in prayers. They had too much grief between the two of them, too many questions and muted accusations and desperate forgiveness all at once. He knows she needs to be alone, as he is now, to pray for the strength to face each day anew. 

Robb prays for wisdom, and in the sept it seems almost attainable to him. Outside the doors his sins crowd in against him. Even the godswood feels haunted, the eyes of the weirwood full of tears for his war's victims. There every question beats against his brow, every misstep, every mistake. Beyond the sept they gather around him with the numbers and fierceness of all his men. Beheading Lord Karstark. Bedding Jeyne. Allowing Edmure command. Blaming his mother. Allowing the Kingslayer in a cell with Alton Lannister. Letting Theon go. Not saving his father. Accepting a crown. Leaving Winterfell. 

The doors may have been enough to shield Robb from condemning and questioning eyes, but the sept had never been able to keep out the dead. In his mind they kneel about him all in silence, cloaked in dust, each one of them red with resentment and dripping with black blood. 

His father. 

Bran and Rickon. 

His bannermen. 

Torrhen and Harrion Karstark. 

The young Lannister boys. 

Robb thinks he sees Richard Karstark kneeling there too, now, and tells himself his death was justice. He no longer pretends that it was wise. 

  


  


  


Maidenhood had always been the most important question about Margaery Tyrell.

After Renly's death, it was the thing that needed the most convincing, the promise that needed the most assurance. Her innocence in Renly's fate had never been a question at all. Her innocence in Renly's bed was another matter entirely.

It was odd, she had thought, that no one ever questioned her role in his death, no one ever asked if she had been involved in some sort of plot. Instead, another woman was blamed, another woman who would be hanged on sight by Renly's most devout supporters, while she herself slipped away, blameless and pure into the arms of another would-be king. She continued her climb in the darkness, shielded by beauty and a strong name, and they never saw what a spider she was.

_They always get it wrong,_ she thinks. As deadly as she was Brienne would never have harmed Renly; as harsh as she looked she was still a woman, and Margaery had known the look in those blue eyes all too well. _They don't know me either_ , she thinks. She plays too well. She wonders if it was the unspoken knowledge of her husband's eccentricities that let the question of her virtue be soothed so easily. Renly's habits must have been a horribly kept secret, to be sure, for she cannot imagine ever being perceived pure if a man like Robert Baratheon had been her husband, no matter for how short a time. 

But here, the people love her, rich and poor. Joffrey looks at her with something akin to wonder and only the queen ever turns a sour eye in her direction.

Still, Margaery always kneels in front of the Maiden to pray, for all the court of King's Landing to see and the rest of the people to hear. 

She wonders at their carelessness, that it is her body that had concerned them all so, and not her mind. 

  


  


  


_What do we say to the god of death?_

_Not today._

There are too many gods, Arya thinks. 

She was snapped at for saying so back in Winterfell, when she was taught about the seven as a child. Her mother's gods. She had always preferred the godswood, the silence under the great white tree and her father sitting there beneath its red face in the quiet of the brushing leaves and pools. But that was a lifetime ago.

All across the north and the south, she had heard people swear by the old gods _and_ the new in a single breath, and she had never considered one to be true and one to be false. They just _were._

Then there was her friend Syrio, who had spoken so certainly of the god of death. She had liked the sound of it, the excitement of fighting against death itself, even her, a little girl. She had been a wolf then, with Needle as her teeth, her bite, before it had been taken from her. Things were always taken away from her or running from her, again and again; the thought made her dizzy, as dizzy as she had been as a child, twirling around and around in her mother's sept when the septas had told her to pray.

In Winterfell no one had ever knelt before the Stranger. 

_Not today,_ she whispered to the air. Perhaps he was the same, the Stranger and Syrio's god of death.

And then there was the Lord of Light. 

Why have so many gods if all of them were so useless to her?

_Could you bring back a man without a head?_

Not today.

  


  


  


The sun had set, and tomorrow Roslin Frey will be married.  


The sun had set, and a single candle lights the sept where she kneels before the seven.  


The sun had set, and tomorrow her prayers will not be heard amongst the screaming voices of the dying.  


Roslin Frey's knees knock together against the cold ground. She knows her weakness will be interpreted as innocence, her tears as a maiden's blushes. She prays that she will hate this Edmure Tully, that he will be cruel and ugly and wretched, so that she will not mourn for his heart once she has helped tear it out of his chest.  


But mostly Roslin Frey prays for forgiveness.  


She crosses the sept to kneel again in front of a matronly face, a kind one, eyes lined with love and not with cruelty.  


She has always been afraid of her father's wrath, so she begs the Mother's forgiveness instead, in fear of the judgment she will find in the face of the Father. 

  


  


  


She barely knew her mother, taken from her by the same beast that killed her son, and her own father is not here to berate her for praying as he did when she was a child, so she turns her face to the gods. 

She's not praying, not really, but in the sept she will not be bothered, won't be touched. Not by her father's talk of marriage or Jaime's foul stump, not by the ignorant trappings of the ladies of the court or her handmaiden's pattering footsteps. _His_ face is there in her mind, though, grinning and bloody and haunting, a face she prays is cut from its body when she sees it next. 

They say the Father is the judge over the souls of the dead, but Cersei longs for power over the souls of the living. _If I were a man,_ she thinks, for the thousandth time. 

She stands there under the faces of the gods, the perfect picture of womanly grief, yet beneath her black finery her heart is alive and pumping with all the hatred and wrath and bloodlust of the seven kingdoms. Cersei turns away from the altar where her son's body had lain, from where she and Jaime had reunited, and looks at the Father's face. In the candlelight it seems kinder than the face of her own.

_He was a child_ , she begs, silently, _a child._

  


  


  


The night went on, and Jon Snow stood on the edge of the world, leg cramped in pain, staring down into the flickering firelight of Mance Raydar's forces. He had never imagined this, back when he knelt in the godswood with Sam to say their vows. _Turncloak_ had never been a word he had expected to say, had never been a word that he had expected to hear leveled at himself. 

It had seemed so simple back then, in the snow with his new brothers at his back, and in those few clear minutes between the swearing of his vows and the arrival of the frozen hand, the world had seemed hopeful, clear again.

_Night gathers, and now my watch begins._

He wishes he could be there now, in the damp snow of the godswood, or better yet, the godswood in Winterfell, next to warm pools and beneath his father's shadow. 

Jon turned to survey his brothers. He caught the half-frozen chattering of one behind him, muttering the Warrior's name, between gulps of something that had once been warm. He had rarely entered the sept at Winterfell. It was Lady Catelyn's place, and so it was not his. Yet he knew all of the faces of the Seven, Maester Luwin had seen to that. If he had ever considered the new gods, he thought, there would never be a better opportunity, a more desperate moment. _Or maybe the last chance I'll ever have,_ he mused. If he would ever have prayed to the new gods, he thought, it would have been to the Smith. The Warrior was hearing enough prayers, he supposed, and he wasn't a warrior, he was a brother. He would pray to the Smith that their defenses would hold. He would pray for more arrows, better swords, better swordsmen. He would pray that their vows were enough to arm them, to cloak them in the face of fear. 

_It shall not end until my death._

The night crept on, and Jon Snow stood silent atop the edge of the world.


End file.
